Board of Directors Blog

Greetings! The United States PostgreSQL Association (PgUS), in accordance with its bylaws, is holding an election for three board member seats (currently being held by Michael Brewer, Joshua Drake, and Bruce Momjian).

Information about the election procedure, timeframe, and links to the nominee platforms are all available at:

The election shall begin now and shall run until December 31st; any person who is a voting member (either Professional or Student) of PgUS before December 31st is eligible to vote. The nominees are Michael Brewer, Joshua Drake, Kevin Kempter, and Bruce Momjian.

Your membership dues allow you to serve on committee as well as help PgUS with various expenses from the CPA, the Attorney and of course supporting various community activities such as speakers. For information on our finances you can review our public financial statements which are located here:

Further with the success of the conference series and the generous membership dues, PgUS is now in a position to start providing grants to relevant PostgreSQL tasks. The first of which are going to be documentation grants.

The U.S. Conference Series held East and West 09. East 2010 is set to happen in late March or April. You can see slides and videos (still being uploaded) at: http://www.postgresqlconference.org/ . The paid memberships and registrations to these conferences help generate more educational material for PostgreSQL than any other source.

As most of you have seen at this point, United States PostgreSQL is about to have elections for three board seats. The seats are currently filled by myself (JD), Bruce Momjian and Michael Brewer. You can read more about the election here. In order to vote, you must be a current member of PgUS. Unfortunately we haven't been as good as we should be about communicating expiring memberships to people. Most of our original members became members at West 2008. The majority of those memberships have now lapsed.

If your membership has lapsed, it is time to re-up. PgUS is now in a financial position to release two grants. As I mentioned in the keynote at West 2009, both of these grants will be awarded just after the new year. In order to receive grants from PgUS, you must be a member. We also need your continued support in financially supporting the U.S. PostgreSQL Conference Series, helping speakers when presenting in locations that require financial sponsorship, and general overhead including financial and legal services.

Below is a list of usernames of current members. If you are not on this list, you are not a member. You can re-join PgUS here. Oh and before I get 700 emails pointing it out, yes my membership lapsed. It will be resolved by the end of the day.

Greetings! We are now accepting nominations for the United States PostgreSQL Association (PgUS) board for the Fall 2009 elections; please submit nominations (full name and a contact email address, please) to:

After a brief battle with our SSL certificate provider that delayed us two weeks, we have succeeded in beating the naysayers into the ground and are ready to begin accepting registrations for PostgreSQL Conference West in Seattle Washington. The conference runs from October 16-18th and is being held at Seattle Central Community College.

For further information on the conference please visit the PostgreSQL Conference website. There you will find links to hotels, the venue address and (in the next couple of weeks) the pending schedule. For those planning to attend it is strongly encouraged for you to join the low traffic attendees mailing list. We look forward to seeing you there!

On Saturday, June 13th, I wound up manning the PostgreSQL booth at SouthEast LinuxFest, in Clemson, South Carolina. This free conference drew a larger crowd than I'd expected; organizers told me there had been some 450 registrants by the day before, and they were expecting a final total of over 500 (with walk-ups). I was on booth duty all day, so I don't know if that figure was accurate, but it was quite crowded (and a little too large for the venue). Clemson didn't seem to be that easy of a place to get to, but it turned out that folks came out from all over; I met people there from Tampa, Warner Robins (GA), Charlotte, and even Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. I had nice chats with Baron Schwartz and D. Richard Hipp, among other people; it was a large and friendly crowd, with many people either already using PostgreSQL or in the process of evaluating/moving to Postgres. (Unsurprisingly, several people cited Oracle's acquisition of Sun/MySQL as additional motivation to try Postgres.)

As I did at OSCON last year, I made some balloon animals, but the talk of this year's booth was the old tuba I brought along. (Picture of me in "Army of Smurfs" attire and tuba here.) People would approach the booth, ask, "So, what's with the tuba?"; I'd point out our logo, go, "Elephant, tuba....", and they'd think, nod, go, "Ahhhh!", and stay and chat a while. ;) (Plus, if I ever got bored, wanted to entertain some of the children that were walking around, or got challenged ["do you really know how to play that thing?"], I'd play a little ditty or two on there.) *Great* booth icebreaker; I highly recommend it for future conferences. ;)

To sum up: Great conference, big crowds (especially considering the location/date); if we get a chance, we should exhibit at SELF again next year.